News: DH Tools Across Disciplines, Anne at Santa Clara University

Cross-posted from anitaconchita.org
This past week, I had the pleasure of leading a workshop on using “Digital Humanities Tools Across Disciplines” at Santa Clara University to their newly formed Center for Arts and Humanities faculty working group in digital humanities and their library. Many thanks to Michelle Burnham and Amy Lueck for the invitation and for the entire SCU crew for the lovely day!

In many ways, I think of our Digital Liberal Arts program at Whittier College to be an exception as far as DH centers go. We embody the “digital liberal arts”, rather than digital humanities, and we’re primarily located in the library (as opposed to an academic department) where we center the work of supporting digital efforts in pedagogy, research, campus initiatives, etc. across disciplines and departments with an emphasis on helping faculty with undergraduate education. We have two full-time staff members, myself and Sonia Chaidez, as well as a faculty director, Andrea Rehn, and student peer mentors, across whom we distribute the work of administering our grants, working with faculty, advising student digital projects, serving on committees, and overall community building in the institution and locally in our city.

Though DigLibArts supports and closely works with faculty to develop, implement, and iterate digital learning activities and assignments as a form of High-Impact Educational Practice, we also work to develop spaces where faculty can build community and share their experiments, successes, and failures, and where students can exhibit their accomplishments. We feel that the community is the most important element to building capacity for Digital Liberal Arts–more important than tools, projects, even funding. These latter elements will grow out of the community.

Below are my (very minimal, and very catty) slides, which draw heavily on the brilliant work already being done by other digital humanists, librarians, and digital pedagogues!

This workshop was primarily an introduction to digital humanities, Digital Liberal Arts, and teaching with digital tools. I was asked to share some tools, and talk about how they could be integrated in the classes. The workshop was about an hour and a half, so I built in time for small group workshopping around particular tools. The next step (and it sounds like the folks at Santa Clara are working on organizing one of these) is planning a learning community and co-working hours where faculty